August 03, 2006

Proof 1/3 Of US Is Nuts, 9/11 Conspiracy Belief Grows According To Poll

A new poll indicates that slightly more than one out of every three Americans believes that the Federal Government either took part in or did nothing to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon nearly five years ago:

More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

The national survey of 1,010 adults also found that anger against the federal government is at record levels, with 54 percent saying they "personally are more angry" at the government than they used to be.

Widespread resentment and alienation toward the national government appears to be fueling a growing acceptance of conspiracy theories about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Suspicions that the 9/11 attacks were "an inside job" - the common phrase used by conspiracy theorists on the Internet - quickly have become nearly as popular as decades-old conspiracy theories that the federal government was responsible for President John F. Kennedy's assassination and that it has covered up proof of space aliens.

American also have more feelings of anger toward the government than before 9/11:

Seventy percent of people who give credence to these theories also say they've become angrier with the federal government than they used to be.

Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."

"One out of three sounds high, but that may very well be right," said Lee Hamilton, former vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also called the 9/11 commission.) His congressionally appointed investigation concluded that federal officials bungled their attempts to prevent, but did not participate in, the attacks by al Qaeda five years ago.

"A lot of people I've encountered believe the U.S. government was involved," Hamilton said. "Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course, we don't think the evidence leads that way at all."

Here are some more of the poll's findings:

Sixteen percent of Americans speculate that secretly planted explosives, not burning passenger jets, were the real reason the massive twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.

Twelve percent suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile in 2001 rather than by an airliner captured by terrorists.

More proof of the "big lie" in action. 9/11 allowed those neo-con fascists to go to war. As is the case with propaganda and overheated rhetoric, it is no wonder that the belief of 9/11 conspiracy has grown in popularity relatively recently. Accusing everyone from the President to Americans in general of being responsible for the attacks directly or indirectly (Bush planned the attacks, the "little Eichmanns", according to Ward Churchill, brought it on themselves by being capitalist "technocrats") allows the moonbat tinfoil-hat crowd to avoid recognizing the true source of the 9/11 terrorist attack, Islamofascism.

Conspiracy-believing participants in the poll agree their suspicions are recent.

"I certainly didn't think of conspiracies when 9/11 first happened," said Elaine Tripp, 62, of Tabernacle, N.J. "I don't know if President Bush was aware of the exact time it was going to happen. But he certainly didn't do enough to stop it. Bush was so intent on having his own little war."

Garrett Johnson, 19, of Manassas, Va., said it was "well after the fact" before he started questioning the official explanation of the attacks. "But then people I know started talking about it. And the Internet had a lot to do with this. After reading all of the different articles there, I started to think we weren't being told the truth."

So should the conservative blogosphere, and decent Americans in general be worried about this trend? Surely having one out of every three people believing such absurdities should give one pause--or maybe that third is just prone to wacky theories and the conspiracy mentality:

The level of suspicion of U.S. official involvement in a 9/11 conspiracy was only slightly behind the 40 percent who suspect "officials in the federal government were directly responsible for the assassination of President Kennedy" and the 38 percent who believe "the federal government is withholding proof of the existence of intelligent life from other planets."

The poll found that a majority of young adults give at least some credence to a 9/11 conspiracy compared to less than a fourth of people 65 or older. Members of racial and ethnic minorities, people with only a high school education and Democrats were especially likely to suspect federal involvement in 9/11.

6 Comments:

Could you help me out? I don't like being played for a sucker and if you have some good counter arguments to the main tenets of the so called "9/11 truth movement" I'd be glad to hear them.

Here are the main points of the "truth movement" as I see it. These are in no particular order.

1. At the very least there should have been time to scramble jets to intercept the plane headed for the pentagon.

2. The timing of the various wargames (TRIPOD, Vigilant Warrior, Vigilant Guardian, etc...) blurred the line between what was happening in the real world and what was a drill. The coincidence of a major terrorist attack with excercises that included the staging of hijackings and the use of planes as missiles shows governmental complicity.

3. The collapse of WTC 7 can best be explained by the controlled demolition hypothesis.

4. The August memo, wargames, foreign intelligence warnings, and prior terrorism drill at the Pentagon demonstrate that the government had foreknowlege.

5. Friends and acquaitances of Mohammed Atta report details about his life that lead to the conclusion that he was a double agent. An ISI officer funded Atta.

6. The towers themselves collapsed in a manner which is inconsistent with the fire + damage theories espoused by FEMA and NIST. NIST's own studies belie the agency's conclusion. (See Kevin Ryan's testimony.)

7. The failure to accept offers to extradite bin Laden, along with the evidence that bin Laden was in Pakistan on September 12th and was in Dubai, demonstrate a lack of will in regards to apprehending bin Laden. A white house official stated that the white house hoped that a premature capture of bin Laden would not undermine the effort to pursue an invasion of Afghanistan.

8. The Bush administration clearly obstructed any investigation into the events of 9/11 while using the event to push a predetermined political agenda.

9. The 9/11 commission failed to address major questions and concerns of the families of 9/11 victims, and was called a "fraud" by Max Clelland who resigned from the commission.

There are many other little details, but these seem to me to be the major talking points of the hucksters in the 9/11 truth movement. My problem is that I find these arguments compelling. Could you help me out?

Anonymous, if you "find these arguments compelling," there is no hope for you. Your only choice is suicide. Get your affairs in order, and take comfort in the knowledge that you will leave the world a little better and a little smarter for you not being in it.

I heard about this poll Friday night on the O'Reilly Factor, just days after Scholars for 9/11 Truth had their shindig televised on C-SPAN. I wrote commentary on the televised event at http://piboulder.wordpress.com.

To anonymous:

The Discovery Channel did some excellent documentaries on what happened, within months of 9/11. Maybe they'll repeat some of them around the anniversary. I'll answer a couple of your queries here.

Re. #1, we need to remember that Pres. Bush was not told of anything about the attack in progress until the first plane hit one of the twin towers. Even then the Bush Admin. was not sure whether it was deliberate or an accident. This is according to Bush's Chief of Staff at the time, Andrew Card. Most people, even the media, thought it might've been an accident. From all the accounts I've heard, the first people who knew we were under attack were the local police and fire crews in Manhattan. They knew it intuitively. No one had to tell them, because it happened on such a clear day. They ruled out an accident just from looking at the evidence. Bush was in Florida at the time.

Hijackings were being reported to flight controllers before the first strike, but we have to remember that the standard response was to just lay back and wait for the plane to land somewhere, and wait for the hijackers to make demands. All hijackings had worked this way before. Even the passengers on the planes knew this. Their response was to not try and make trouble. They assumed they were hostages. Flight 93 was delayed, unlike the other planes in the coordinated attack. Al Qaeda planned their attacks on flights that were scheduled to take off around the same time. When the plane was hijacked, passengers received calls from their families telling them "The hijackers are crashing planes into buildings." The twin towers had already been hit, and the situation was being reported on the news. This is the reason they knew they should take aggressive action against their hijackers.

Bush was not told we were definitely under attack until the 2nd plane hit the other tower. That's when everyone "got it". Shortly thereafter the 3rd plane hit the Pentagon. Jets were finally scrambled, but the only hijacked plane still left in the air was Flight 93. My understanding is that military ground radar that would've been able to watch for jets was only positioned to watch for Soviet jets, out along the coastline and beyond. Our military infrastructure was designed for the Cold War: Soviet jets, bombers, and intercontinental missiles. Not this. They could not see inside the country. The only other possibility I can think of is perhaps NORAD would've been able to see them, but I'm no expert on their capabilities. The only people who knew concretely the whereabouts of the civilian jets and which ones were hijacked were the civilian flight controllers. The order was given to shoot down hijacked aircraft. To tell you the truth I don't know how these rogue aircraft would've been intercepted, unless they managed to link up civilian controllers with the Air Force somehow. Before that order could be carried out on Flight 93, the passengers had struck back, and the hijackers steered the plane into the ground in PA.

Re. #7, you know, some of these allegations exhibit the classic symptoms of "based on what we know now, why didn't the government stop it?" It expresses a desire to take the knowledge of what we know, go back in time and stop it. It's just silly. People need to get it through their head that we did not know then what we know now! I, too, wish the Clinton Admin. had stopped bin Laden before all this happened. He had some opportunities to do so, but did not take them. Clinton insisted on trying terrorists in our court system. There was no "War on Terror" during his presidency. To try them in court you need evidence. The line we keep getting everytime someone from the Clinton Admin. is asked about this is "we didn't have the evidence to convict him." They tried some covert actions against bin Laden, but they lacked the cajones to take decisive action when push came to shove. There was always something getting in the way. For example, we had a joint operation with Pakistan to get bin Laden. When Musharref took over in a coup, the Clinton Admin. called off the operation.

My own commentary on Scholars for 9/11 Truth does not answer all of their allegations, as it would take time out of my life to investigate some of them, which I'm unwilling to give to it. It answers some of them though.

People such as yourself need to learn discernment when trying to judge whether to trust information or not. This takes experience and making some mistakes. It's okay to make mistakes. Just don't shut yourself off to hearing the "other side" of a story. See if it makes more sense than what you already know, or not.

To follow up my previous post, Popular Mechanics published an article about 1-1/2 years ago on 9/11 conspiracy theories. It has authoritative answers for each of these topics:

- The "pod" underneath the right wing of Flight 175

- The supposed Air Force stand-down order

- The claim that Flight 175 was a military aircraft or fuel tanker

- The claim that it's routine to intercept civilian flights that do not respond to air traffic controllers

- The claim that the plane crashes could not have caused all the damage that occurred before the buildings collapsed

- The claim that the steel could not have melted (false premise) at the temperatures reached by the jet fuel fire (another false premise).

- The claim that only explosive charges could have created the concrete dust as the collapse occurred.

- The claim that seismic spikes recorded by seismographs show that demolition charges were set off

- The claim that WTC 7 was brought down by demolition charges

- the claim that the impact holes in the Pentagon were too small to be from a plane

- The claim that a missile must have hit the Pentagon because windows around the crash site were still intact

- The claim that no airplane wreckage was found at the Pentagon

- The White Jet at the Flight 93 crash site

- The claims that Flight 93 was hit by a heat-seeking missile

The article corrects something I said in my previous post. It turns out that 2 military jets were scrambled after NORAD was contacted by FAA flight controllers, concerning the first hijacked jet. Only 14 jets were on standby in the entire country at the time of the attack. The thing was, the hijackers had turned the planes' transponders off, so they could not be identified. Flight controllers made several calls to NORAD updating them on the situation. This is the only way the military knew what was happening. Unfortunately the military jets did not get close to any of the hijacked planes.

The article lists 71 acknowledged sources for their investigation, some of whom have been quoted in conspiracy theorist literature inaccurately. They said that in all, 300 experts and organizations were consulted for the piece.

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